Govt signs deal with South Korea for legal protection of Thai workers

A new agreement will help protect the interests of more than 100,000 Thai nationals working in South Korea in criminal cases, a senior official said on Thursday.

Rights and Liberties Protection Department director-general Pitikarn Sithidej said she had recently signed a memorandum of understanding with South Korea’s labour authority.

She said Thai workers would be entitled to remedial measures as per South Korean laws, just as South Koreans working in Thailand were entitled to legal remedies as per Thai laws.

Separately, Pitikarn also spoke about the department’s proposal to the United Nations to withdraw four names from the 82 Thais listed for alleged enforced or involuntary disappearance.

She said the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances had explained that the agency could not remove any name from the list unless such a request came from the relatives of missing people.

Pitikarn said the four names that Thai authorities wanted the UN to remove were those who had disappeared during the 1992 Black May uprising, as they had already been found. Two were still alive and two others reportedly died a decade after the incident.

Pitikarn said that 38 names in the current list of 82, mostly from hilltribes in the North, were people who had gone missing during the government’s war on drugs in 2003, while the rest were people who had gone missing in the southern border provinces.

She said the department would visit relatives of the missing people to get confirmation that they no longer had doubts over the disappearances, after which an application would be filed with the UN to withdraw their names.